The Human Potential Project

MIT: 16 Recommendations to Engage a New World

“The MIT education of the future is likely to be more global in its orientation and engagement, more modular and flexible in its offerings, and more open to experiments with new modes of learning. Those are some themes of the 16 recommendations contained in the final report of the Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education, convened 18 months ago by President L. Rafael Reif to envision the MIT of 2020 and beyond.

Among other priorities, the Task Force’s report urges the establishment of an MIT Initiative for Educational Innovation, to foster ongoing experimentation and research in teaching and learning, and recommends that MIT engage with teachers and learners worldwide to broadcast this educational innovation well beyond its own campus. The report also suggests that MIT consider offering different levels of certification through its online-learning ventures, MITx and edX, and recommends that the Institute redouble its commitment to access and affordability — possibly by increasing MIT’s undergraduate population, which has remained stable for decades despite increasing demand, or by providing flexibility to allow students to complete a traditional undergraduate degree in less than four years.

In its final report, the Task Force organizes its 16 recommendations around four themes:

laying a foundation for the future, by creating a proposed Initiative for Educational Innovation;

transforming pedagogy, largely through “bold experiments” sponsored by the proposed new initiative;

extending MIT’s educational impact, to teachers and learners well beyond its own campus; and

enabling the future of MIT education, by cultivating new revenue streams and envisioning new spaces to support learning at MIT.”